


Fireside

by imitateslife



Category: Victor Frankenstein (2015)
Genre: And it isn't greed or hatred!, Angst, Finnegan actually has an emotion!, Hate Sex, Love/Hate, M/M, Or Is It?, What's new? I'm trash for this ship.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-29
Updated: 2017-08-29
Packaged: 2018-12-21 06:10:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11937975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imitateslife/pseuds/imitateslife
Summary: Victor is a wildfire and sometimes, Finnegan craves little warmth. Modern Finnestein.





	Fireside

**Author's Note:**

> This is based on a Finnestein roleplay I've been working on. I've finally gotten brave enough to post it here!

It’s rare that Victor stays the night – the whole night, I mean. Of course he “ _stays the night”_  at my behest –  _why wouldn’t he?_  – but by morning the sheets where he’s been sleeping are mussed and they smell faintly woodsy and that is the only evidence he’s been here or else I can tell by the pull of my muscles, an unfortunate bite mark I’ll have to cover up… that sort of thing. But every now and then, he’s too exhausted to leave and I let him stay face-down on my bed. Rarer still, there are nights when I feel him roll towards the edge of the bed and I can’t help myself: my arms wrap around his waist, my nails dig into his hipbone.

“ _Stay_.”

“I’m not your dog.” He rolls over and smirks and says, “Next you’ll want me to  _come_  at your beck and call,” before prying me loose and slipping off into the darkness.

He thinks he’s clever in those moments, but I usually have something to say – something sharp enough to cut. It’s a small consolation to remind him – to remind myself – that he’s nothing to me but  _convenient_. Small consolation, but consolation enough.

More consolation is that I know how he is when he does stay. He tosses and twitches in his sleep, as energetic at rest as he is awake. It’s impossible to sleep when he stays and so I don’t. Instead, I light a cigarette and watch him, wondering what it is that gives him fits. They’re practically epileptic. Jerky movements, quick and unpredictable. He kicks my shins, claws the headboard, throws the blankets to the floor.

And all I can think is that I hope he doesn’t tear the Egyptian cotton he’s flailing on.

(That and I wonder what it is that keeps him so restless, but of course I don’t ask. Better to care about my six hundred thread-count sheets than his feelings, better to care about things I can replace if they get torn to bits. I also think, sometimes, that he deserves painful, restless sleep for all the little things he does during the waking hours to drive me mad and I begin to count backwards from a hundred all the things he’s done that day to merit nightmares, insomnia, and all the little, mundane curses of life.)

Mostly, I don’t think. I smoke. I watch. I frown and dodge his flying limbs.

Once, he woke up from one of these spastic sleeps and his blue eyes were unfocused, hazy. He didn’t quite seem like himself, usually so alert and intelligent. He looked around the room and called out to someone who was not there.

Sometimes, I still wonder who Henry is. Not that I ask. We have never been shy about our indiscretions, but neither do we ask each other about them.

I didn’t ask then, either. I put my cigarette out on the ashtray at my side of the bed and reached for his bare shoulders.

“Guess again.”

He blinked a few times and I swore that there were tears in his eyes. Then he smiled sadly at me –  _through_ me -  and cleared his throat.

“I should get home,” he said. But instead of leaving, he let me pull him back onto the mattress.

“You aren’t going anywhere,” I said. “Not now that you’re  _awake_  and with such  _energy_ …”

I wanted to make him forget any other man’s name – even his own – and just hear mine roaring through his brain, the crackle of an unquenchable wildfire. Maybe I could get him to burn so hot that he would burn me, scorch my errant thoughts until I was a razed forest, full of rich, black soil where something other than weeds could grow. I don’t know why I alighted upon him in the first place, but I do think that had something to do with it. Everyone thinks water washes you clean, but fire is what gives you a new start. It warms, it burns. And I was so cold when we met. I still am, but every now and then, I can siphon some of his heat and melt just a little bit, for just a little while. Thaw.

But whenever he leaves – and he always leaves – I freeze back into the mold I’ve made for myself (or perhaps that others have made for me). I stare at the ceiling, grab another cigarette. I didn’t smoke until I met him. Any student of psychology will tell you it’s just a poor coping mechanism and that I picked it up the same year I started university and working at my father's company in an official capacity and campaigning for student government and half another dozen things so,  _of course_  I was stressed and  _of course_  I was handling it poorly and that it’s a bloody wonder I didn’t take up cocaine or prescription pills like everyone else I knew. Sometimes I wish I would have. But sometimes I would think that I lit up just so I could see something of a spark when he wasn’t there – the glowing end of my cigarette, bright orange and familiar.  _Warm_.  _Hot_. Familiar and different.

He hates it - of course he does. It wouldn’t do for a man in the health profession to condone smoking. He can scarcely believe I’d do it and he speaks with impassioned, almost moral outrage. - which I tell him is one of the most appealing things about it to begin with. Maybe it is. Watching anger and indignation ignite in his eyes, his smile spark and flicker.

“You’re going to give me lung cancer,” he says. I blow a ring of smoke in his face just to see embers glow orange in his eyes.Then he says, “I hope  _you_  get lung cancer.”

I know why he’s angry. Not because I’ve blown smoke in his face, but because I’ve put up a thick smokescreen around  _us_ , so hazy, the world can’t see us. That’s the whole point. That no one know what we do in the dark and why or with whom. It wouldn’t do, you understand, for me to be seen with him in public. Not because he’s a man. Not because he works for me. But because that temper of his has prompted him to dump someone else’s latte on the lap of our CFO. Because he gets too drunk at company parties and extemporizes on innovations in in-vitro fertilization that would make even leading experts in the field blush. Because he's reckless and mad and dangerous and blazes through life with little care for what wreckage he leaves behind. Because he is nothing but a wildfire and I can’t have him destroying my family’s empire or reducing my future to ash. I can’t make him understand the fear of getting burned.

But I can warm myself from a safe distance, get a little feeling in my numb fingers. And so there are nights when I fear the cold and empty, nights when I want something more to cling to than a cigarette. And so there are nights when, before he can leave, I pull him back to bed and command him in a voice I can only hope he never learns to resist –

“ _Stay._ ”


End file.
